Help potential buyers visualize living in your home

Friday

Feb 22, 2013 at 12:15 PMFeb 22, 2013 at 10:10 PM

Tips on home staging, return investments on adding outdoor living space, and gardenias.

Home Selling Tip

If you're selling a four-bedroom house in a family neighborhood, decorate to appeal to families. Whether you really have children or not, one of the bedrooms should be shown as a kid's room and one possibly as a nursery. Create a comfortable and welcoming family room. Remember, you want buyers to imagine their lives in your home. If they can't visualize where the kids will play, they'll move on to the next listing.

-- Debra Gould, Frontdoor.com

Did You Know ...

"Homeowners continue to embrace the trend of maximizing outdoor living space, whether it's an outdoor kitchen or patio living room with a fire pit," says Lonny Sekeres, a landscape designer with Villa Landscapes in Oakdale, Minn. "Real estate experts say that for every dollar you invest in landscaping projects, you could see up to a $2 return when you sell your home."

-- Brandpoint

Garden Guide

Gardenia (Gardenia jasminoides) is a popular evergreen shrub across the Southeast, the West Coast and wherever winters are relatively mild. In colder climates it makes a dandy potted plant for a sunny winter window.

Easy to grow

With glossy, dark green leaves and pure white flowers, this heirloom shrub makes a striking addition to the summer garden. The intense fragrance of gardenia blossoms can almost make people swoon with its cloying sweetness, especially on warm, muggy summer nights.

Gardenia grows well in both sun and moderate shade, and can tolerate drought -- I have seen it thriving in old cemeteries with no care at all. But the shrubs require well-drained soil and a nice wide root system. This simply means dig a wide hole and lightly amend it with bark or compost so water doesn’t puddle around roots for long.

Challenges and opportunity

When grown in alkaline soils or areas with hard water, leaves may turn pale green between the veins, indicating a need for an iron fertilizer supplement (ask at a garden center). Also, as older leaves begin to lose their vigor, right before dropping off they often turn bright yellow, which can alarm some gardeners.

Gardenia is also plagued by whiteflies and aphids, which can exude partly-digested sap called “honey dew“ that leaves a sticky residue, and sometimes get covered with black ”sooty mold” (see my blog post on this subject). Just wet it down with soapy water and rinse with clear water, and it will flake off.

Gardenia is one of the easiest shrubs of all to root. Simply cut off the tip end of a branch in mid-summer, strip off any blooms and a few lower leaves, and stick in a bottle of water. Roots will be visible in just days, and the cutting can be planted within a month!